By Sandeep Pathak, Deputy General Manager – Products & Services
Enterprises today operate in a transformed business environment and IT leaders are tasked with realigning their organisation’s digital infrastructure with the ‘new normal’. While the pandemic-led disruption has transformed business processes in a plethora of ways with digital at the centre, data has been at the core of everything, as business processes, customer engagements and collaboration generate more data than ever before.
The new normal has also brought new challenges with it; IT leaders are taking a fresh look at digital solutions to address these challenges, and enterprise data backup and recovery solutions are among the top on the list amidst the increasing need for data availability.
Unlike traditional environments where data resided on premise, within the office perimeters, data is now getting generated and stored at multiple points. In a distributed workforce environment with remotely located employees, data stored on employees’ endpoint devices is more exposed to risks.
While IT teams held greater control over business data stored on premise, today’s remotely located endpoint devices are more vulnerable to data loss due to various reasons – intentional or accidental deletion of data, data breach, lost device, etc.
In a digital environment that demands high-availability of data, ensuring that your business critical data is always at your disposal is paramount. Enterprise endpoint backup solutions must address the challenges of today’s complex business environment through a holistic approach.
Identifying endpoint vulnerabilities, cybercriminals are launching targeted attacks on endpoint devices. As employees continue to work from remote locations, generating and working with business data stored on their laptops and desktops, they become the low hanging fruits for ransomware and other malicious attacks.
This, added with the common challenges of hardware down, storage devices crash, lost laptop etc, requires IT teams to have complete visibility and control over data. Let’s deep-dive into some of the things that can relieve IT teams from data worries and ensure data readiness.
- Endpoint-centric approach: Growth in the number of endpoint devices is one of the biggest impacts of the Work-From-Home shift. Although cloud adoption and the integrated data security frameworks of the cloud protects business data effectively, managing data stored on endpoint devices continues to be a challenge. With data residing beyond the controlled and secured office IT environment, enterprise data backup and recovery solutions must ensure protection of endpoint data.
- Aware of Ransomware: The threat of ransomware is more prevalent in today’s remotely connected business ecosystem. According to IDC, about one third of organisations globally have experienced a ransomware incident, blocking access to systems or data in the past 12 months. Owing to the vulnerability of endpoint devices to ransomware attacks, it is imperative to have an enterprise data backup and recovery solution that understands ransomware and can detect anomalies, thereby helping to secure endpoint data.
- Automated backups: Adding to the complexities is the task of managing data on employee laptops from a remote location, unlike an office environment where IT can physical access the laptop. Moreover, manual management of backups translates to significant time and efforts. To streamline this process, organisations need an enterprise endpoint backup and recovery solution that offers automated backup scheduling and provides visibility into all remote devices from a single dashboard.
- Self-service capabilities: IT teams are required to channelise their focus on business critical applications and innovations as the organisations IT needs evolve. In a fast-paced, dynamic scenario like this, empowering employees with the capabilities to restore data without the IT desk’s support significantly makes simplifies things and keeps business processes running seamlessly.
- Geo-location and remote-wipe: Having complete visibility and control of endpoint devices is crucial in a distributed work environment. Laptops are more exposed to physical threats outside office boundaries. A backup and recovery solution that provides geo-location, encryption, and remote wipe of data ensures that your data doesn’t fall into wrong hands in case of loss or theft.
Work-From-Home is here to stay, even as organisations mull a hybrid approach. With business leaders focusing on constantly making strides in the area of digital transformation, data will fuel digital innovation. Thus, data protection will be among the top priorities for any modern business. an Enterprise endpoint backup and recovery solutions will be a crucial part of the overall data security strategy. A robust backup and recovery framework that meets the needs of the constantly-evolving digital ecosystem, will be a key defining factor of business resiliency.
